


Trapdoor

by honorarycassowary



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Door Trauma, Gen, It/Its Pronouns for Michael (The Magnus Archives), Paranoia, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:13:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22610794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary
Summary: Jon stays late to investigate Gertrude's laptop. Michael appears to poke at old wounds.
Relationships: Michael & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 15
Kudos: 70
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	Trapdoor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [what_the_nesmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_the_nesmith/gifts).



The light of the laptop screen dug into Jon’s eyes and made them feel loose in their sockets. It felt like they were on the verge of melting and flowing out of his head into the laptop itself, merging with the wires and chips. After Miss Winters’ statement, it was an unsettling thought, but a fantasy he found himself returning to nonetheless. 

Sometimes his sockets felt already empty, and he had to reach up and touch his eyes to remind himself that they were still there. At least when he didn’t sleep, he knew what parts of him were him.

The tunnels were dark, but there was the occasional room with electricity, like the one he’d set up in. God knows who paid the bills down here. They were the only place he knew that were safe from the feeling of being watched that followed him in his office. Even if Sasha knew her way down here, she was the assistant whose motives concerned him the least. 

“So diligent,” a voice sighed.

Jon slammed the laptop shut and jerked around to face the voice, positioning himself between it and the laptop like a human shield. The information inside it was too precious to lose. He didn’t have a real weapon, but he kept his corkscrew and lighter close at hand in case there were any worms still lingering in the tunnels, so he could dig them out and burn them.

The owner of the voice looked elongated but dense, like someone had stretched it out while simultaneously compressing its individual limbs. 

“Michael,” Jon hissed.

“A word that has referred to me.”

Jon glanced to the side to check that the room still had a door, and Michael settled into the shape of a perfectly ordinary tall blond man, like it had just been a shape distorted in Jon’s peripheral vision. He tried to trace the transformation as he looked back - were Michael’s powers tied to being observed? - but it refracted and unfolded its body in ways his eye couldn’t trace. It was profoundly disconcerting.

“What do you want?” he snapped. He had no idea what warning signs to watch out for, beyond staying away from its hands if at all possible. He remembered the feeling of them reaching past his skin all too well, and he was not keen to experience it again. 

The doors were a bigger concern. He hadn’t seen Michael eat Helen Richardson, he just knew it had happened. All he could do was push and see what he learned for next time. 

Michael shrugged. It was a multi-jointed movement that began in its neck and ended in its ribcage. “You’ll hurt your eyes if you keep on like this. Not that it matters, I suppose.”

Jon felt a chill. “Is that a threat?”

“No,” Michael said. It looked back at Jon, and it twisted again. Or - Jon didn’t see it move, it was just different, like he had blinked and the image on his computer screen had changed. Michael loomed over him, its legs folding differently every time Jon looked down at them, its many-jointed fingers so long they trailed out of the edges of Jon’s vision. He felt them tap their way up his spine, and tried not to count how many he felt. “ _ She _ needed her eyes,” it continued. “But you are a much more enthusiastic Archivist than her.”

“She - you mean Gertrude? You knew her?”

“I knew  _ of _ her, Archivist, so much as anything can be known. I did not know  _ her _ .”

“I don’t believe you,” Jon said. He reached behind him and grabbed the laptop, pulling it to his chest. Then, with more force: “Tell me about her.” 

He’d clung to deliberate blindness to Gertrude’s fate for too long. She was a player in this game, one that had deliberately hid herself from him. Who would be a better ally for his predecessor’s lies than a creature who claimed to be made of them?

Michael’s smile slipped across its face like oil through water. “You _ are  _ bold.”

“Tell me!”

“No, “ Michael said. “No, I think not.”

Jon felt an ugly twist in his stomach. It settled in his brain like a hunger headache. “What do you mean, no?”

“Statements are for people, Archivist, and we are both places.”

Michael’s eyes were distant, the only steady points on its body. Looking too long into its pupils was like looking at an optical illusion that only appeared when you focused your eyes. It made Jon feel like he was spiralling, like he was about to be crushed by the tunnels beneath the institute, like he was watched and alone and hunted by everyone he had once trusted. They were pits of absolute justification.

“I - I don’t understand.”

“I am the hand,” Michael said, spreading its fractal fingers. They sucked the eye in like they had weight. “The halls are my stomach.”

“Your organs. Where you digest your .... meals. Like Miss Richardson.”

“And plucked her right out of your mouth.”

“My  _ mouth _ ?” Jon said. “ _ You _ ate her. I asked her a few questions!”

Michael laughed. The sound filled the room, or maybe the room filled it. “As I said. You are a stomach, Archivist, and your assistants are hands.”

“This is nonsense,” Jon said. He broke his gaze and focused his eyes on the wall. The bricks formed a pattern of crosses, and he latched on to them as an anchor in the face of Michael’s distortion. “You’re making less sense than Martin, which is quite an accomplishment.”

“Perhaps I can rephrase myself for you,” Michael said. “You are a spider, Archivist, sitting fat in your web. You draw in your statements and you drink your fill. The only thing you can drink from me, I do not want to give.”

Jon thought of Mr. Horse and his son, and nearly threw up. He wanted to forget.

He knew what monsters were. Mr. Spider, who had nearly eaten him. Jurgen Leitner, whose web of cursed books seemed to spread across decades.

Michael, who had tormented and hunted Helen Richardson over the course of days, who might still be eating her now in some other dimension.

He - Jonathan Sims - was something else.

Michael smiled pleasantly, its joints coiling and unwinding in the corners of Jon’s eyes, he felt the fear tangle into something new. He was furious, a hungry anger looking for retaliation that built in his gut and behind his eyes. 

Somewhere inside him, he noted: Michael said I could “drink from it.” So it does have something I can use.

Jon flicked on his lighter and advanced on Michael. “Get out,” he said.

“I may not be real, Archivist, but I’m hardly a shadow,” it said, undulating backwards and away from him.

“If you want to convince me you can’t burn, backing away is ruining the act,” Jon said, focusing on those terrible pupils, letting them strip away his self-doubt.

“Do you treat your assistants this way?” Michael asked, tilting its head. The motion was more owl-like than human. The neck bent too far, and its face seemed like it didn’t reflect the bones underneath. “Your statement givers?”

“I give them exactly the respect they deserve.”

“You released Miss Richardson right into my hallways. What does that say about respect?”

“It says,” Jon ground out. “That you’re a liar and a murderer.”

“Oh Archivist,” Michael sighed. “By the time anything dies in my hallways, they’ve long since stopped considering their deaths anything but mercy. Something Miss Winters would understand. You spoke to her about the laptop, didn’t you?”

Jon started formulating an argument about how asking Miss Winters to break into the laptop for him had been a sign of how much he had respected her technical expertise, but something snagged at his mind.

“Ms. Winters - you were watching that?” Did Michael care about the files on Gertrude’s laptop? Was the unchanging structure of data too rigid for it to manipulate like its hallways? What was he missing?

“Yes. An old habit.”

Jon froze. The lighter flickered out. What else had it seen? It had spoken to Sasha before - did it know why she was visiting the waxworks? Was  _ it _ what she was visiting? She had claimed they were dates with her boyfriend, but Michael was clearly capable of distorting its shape. Motive was a question, but she had withdrawn from him over the past months. When she had given her statement, she had said Michael wanted to save his life - a misdirection? Or a lie evidencing a longer partnership she partially revealed to frighten him? She  _ had _ left the rest of the Archives staff during Prentiss’s attack. Was it possible she had intended for them to die? Sasha’s encounter with Michael had been the closest encounter any of them had had with the worms prior to the attack, barring Martin; she could have intentionally deceived him about the worms’ powers, knowing an attack was imminent, hoping that they would enter the tunnels. And not only that - Michael was clearly connected to the hallways Ms. Richardson found herself in; could it be related to the tunnels beneath the Institute as well? Sasha’s behavior in the tunnels had been strange. He had been proceeding under the assumption that the tunnels were dangerous, but not necessarily loyal to any one force. But it did stand to reason that the two examples of malevolent architecture he had encountered were connected. And then there was the Leitner. Mr. Spider. He hadn’t spoken to Sasha directly about  _ that _ book, but they had discussed other Leitners when they were in Research together. It was possible she had inferred some past trauma and passed it on to Michael. 

He backed away towards the door he knew was behind him. “I still have Helen Richardson’s map!” he shouted, clutching the laptop to his chest like a child. The map in question was upstairs, filed away with the rest of statement #0161002, too twisted and incoherent for him to remember more than an impression of the colors she had used. “I am not going to be digested in your tunnels!”

Michael rippled with laughter, like it was a two-dimensional cutout being battered by an invisible wind. Its limbs bent and fluttered, gaining and losing dimensionality as he watched.

“You have such a swift mind,” it sighed. “You’re going to follow it right into danger someday.”

“What do you mean?” Jon demanded. Was that a confirmation that he was correct? A threat? A warning that he was jumping to conclusions or a lie designed to insert doubt into his mind?

A door creaked open to his right. Jon knew that it had never been there before, but he felt it had been present in the back of his mind and the corner of his eye for a long, long time. He stumbled further backwards towards the real door, hoping it had ever actually existed. He thought of walls closing in around him and pinning him in place until long, thin arms pulled him through the door in his memories. 

He shut his eyes. He didn’t want to know. He could imagine all too well. He knew reality would be worse than the worst nightmare he had had.

Nothing happened.

Jon risked a peek. It was a cold, stone room with two very real doors. One of the doors was also Michael, flesh and fractal and frame all at once.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled, staring again into the thing’s warping face. “Tell me what you mean!”

Michael laughed, and the room echoed laughter with it. Jon shuddered violently.

“Oh, I’ve said quite enough for today. But if you need me, Archivist,” it said, “remember: all you need to do is  _ knock _ .”


End file.
